Yue-Ling Wong's Sample Work Related to Digital Media

Brief Description: This was an interactive piece for the dance performance, Fibonacci + Phi. Artists use mannequins posed in various ways to render accurate copies of human gestures and motion. The paradoxes that I wanted to express in this piece were: What if the roles were reversed? What if a human tried to dance with a mannequin, and the mannequin led the dance? Who, then, is the master of whom? In Manipulation Dance, two computer 3-D models of mannequins, created in 3ds max and computer programmed in Macromedia Director, led a dance with human partners. Although the mannequins’ movements were based on motion capture data, their movements became original and unexpected during the performance by means of an original twist in this design. Taking a signal from dancers by means of a wireless joystick and a computer keyboard, the upper and lower bodies of each mannequin were able to move independently. Each of the upper and lower bodies could dance forward or backward in its own timeline and at its own speed. To enable an interaction between human and computer, live dancers on stage tried to keep up with the mannequins. The Manipulation Dance explored the nonlinear re-creation of dance phrases by deconstructing and recombining pre-choreographed movements in real-time into new forms of expression. See pictures and read more »

Demo:

Instructions: Click once inside first. Use the keys to control the movement of the mannequins.

Basically, the top row keys on the keyboard control the speed of the upper body movement of the blue mannequin, the 2nd row keys control the speed of the legs of the blue mannequin, the 3rd row keys control the speed of the upper body of the red mannequin, the 4th row keys control the legs of the red mannequin. (In the actual dance performance, one of the mannequins was controlled using a joystick and the other with keyboard, so that two human players can control the mannequins individually without having to compete for the keyboard.)

BLUE mannequin:

1, 2, 3, 4: The speed of REVERSE movement of the UPPER body; 1 being the fastest in reverse motion.
6, 7, 8, 9: The speed of FORWARD movement of the UPPER body; 9 being the fastest in forward motion
5: Pause the movement of the UPPER body

q, w, e, r: The speed of REVERSE movement of the LEGS; q being the fastest in reverse motion.
y, u, i, o: The speed of FORWARD movement of the LEGS; o being the fastest in forward motion
t: Pause the movement of the LEGS

RED mannequin:

a, s, d, f: The speed of REVERSE movement of the UPPER body; a being the fastest in reverse motion.
h, j, k, l: The speed of FORWARD movement of the UPPER body; 9 being the fastest in forward motion
g: Pause the movement of the UPPER body

z, x, c, v: The speed of REVERSE movement of the LEGS; q being the fastest in reverse motion.
n, m, comma, period: The speed of FORWARD movement of the LEGS; o being the fastest in forward motion
b: Pause the movement of the LEGS